Dailyhunt forays into global market, expands operations to the Middle East
- ByStartupStory | June 21, 2022
Dailyhunt will be launched across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, and Kuwait, according to the Bengaluru-based startup. Shekhar Iyer, a media veteran, leads the startup’s activities in the area as Director and General Manager of VerSe Innovation, MENA (the Middle East and North Africa). The expansion comes after the firm secured $805 million in a Series J round valued at $5 billion, valuing the company at $5 billion. It joins a slew of Indian businesses seeking the Gulf market.
“We want to address the unmet content demands of a market with very comparable, linguistically different customers, as seen in a local language dominant market like India,” says Umang Bedi, VerSe Innovation’s co-founder. “In the region, news is a very high-interest category that is consumed via mobile–web and app. In the local language sector, there is no incumbent major player,” he continued.
In the region, VerSe has worked with over 5,000 content publishers. It currently only has English material, but Arabic will be added in a few weeks. It intends to grow into MENA nations such as Iraq, Iran, Israel, and Egypt, as well as provide support for Hebrew, Farsi, and Arabic.
Dailyhunt is tapping into a $5 billion+ internet advertising industry. According to the World Population Review, the Middle Eastern area has a population of around 400 million people who speak a variety of languages. This makes it a market equivalent in size to India for Dailyhunt.
Due to the stronger spending power of Gulf customers, the business expects to generate more ad income per user. In addition to these indigenous languages and formats, the area has a substantial publishing base. Plans to expand outside India had been in the works for more than a year, but were put on hold owing to the epidemic.
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